


Wolf Hearts

by thegrimshapeofyoursmile



Series: To Build A Home [5]
Category: Bakuten Shoot Beyblade, Beyblade
Genre: Family Drama, Found Family, Gen, Mental Illness, OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Other, Slice of Life, Therapy, boyuka, trauma healing, working through trauma, yuriy-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:40:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29216571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrimshapeofyoursmile/pseuds/thegrimshapeofyoursmile
Summary: Yuriy meets his mother and the fox girl, loses his mind and finds himself again. Sergey tries to help, Ivan has the right words, Kai brings the spark and Boris leads him home. Wolf hearts are quiet and complicated, but the hunger for light and life always, always moves them forward.
Relationships: Hiwatari Kai/Yuri Ivanov | Tala Valkov/Boris Kuznetsov | Bryan Kuznetsov
Series: To Build A Home [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1909858
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	1. Slip

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING** for compulsive actions (compulsive hand-washing) in section 2 of this.
> 
> It might confuse you to hell and back if you haven't read the previous parts of this series, but then again, this story really is basically the heart of all of it. I'd like to make it very clear that this is a story about working through hard times and healing. I've no interest in drama and tears without catharsis. That said, there are some heavy hitters in this story because life is not easy sometimes.
> 
> For context: This takes place 1-2 years-ish after "Catching Meteorites". Yuriy is about 22-23.

**1.**  


One of the axioms of probability theory stated that for any event A∈Σ, the probability of A was a real number between 0 and 1. In the case of 'Yuriy meets his mother', this number tended so strongly toward zero that it should not have been possible for her to run into him at the market during the week, proving once again that nothing in life was certain, not even science.

He was just staring thoughtfully at a box of cabbage, wondering if it was suitable for borsch. The sun was shining, but the day was still quite fresh. Moscow still remembered the winter that was unwilling to leave despite continuously rising temperatures, so Yuriy not only wore his thick, black winter coat, but had also stolen Kai's scarf. Since he disliked wearing anything on his head and never did unless it really could not be avoided, he had foregone a cap and, given the sometimes rather sharp wind, was not yet sure whether he regretted that decision or not. At least the fresh weather helped him get done with his business a little faster than usual and he went on, satisfied, to find suitable meat as the last item on his list before heading home again.

Then he bumped into the fox girl.

To be honest, that was not an adequate description of what happened because it implied a certain randomness on both sides. What really happened was that suddenly a red shadow came hurtling toward him, screaming "Mama!" and then slamming unchecked into his legs like a meteorite into the earth. It was only thanks to years of dealing with Ivan's surprise attacks from dark corners that he was able to stay on his feet.

With a silent, only half-suppressed curse, he grabbed the red shadow and plucked it from his coat.

The red shadow stared at him. It was a little girl, certainly no older than maybe ten at most, and with a face that had a distinct dimple in her chin, giving her a bit of sass. Her hair was braided into two thin pigtails that hung down to her shoulders, secured at the ends with colorful hair ties. On her dark blue coat, thickly lined and of good quality, there was a fox family to be found at the hem. She had big brown eyes that now looked at Yuriy almost accusingly as she stated, "You're not my mama."

Her hair was the same, exactly the same shade of red as his own.

"No," Yuriy agreed dryly. He gently set her on her booted feet, trying to ignore the rising sense of danger that had absolutely no justification. Then again, his instincts usually never betrayed him. He brushed away a strand of his hair, which he had allowed to grow back so that it now had its tips touching his coat collar in a medium-length ponytail. Then he scolded himself silly and looked down at his new acquaintance with a furrowed brow. "Did you lose her?"

"I'll find her again," the fox girl said with a fascinatingly unwavering certainty for someone so little. Yuriy was torn between moral decency and the fact that he had always had a hard time with children under the age of at least twelve. Then again, most small children tended to fear him, which didn't seem to be the case with the fox girl who continued to eye him with great interest. She seemed to have little fear in general. Yuriy sometimes forgot that most children had the unshakable confidence that the world only meant well for them.

"Did you know that only two percent of all people in the world have red hair?" she asked.

"One to two percent," Yuriy automatically corrected, to which she rolled her eyes as if he was being pedantic and not scientifically correct. Yuriy adjusted his assessment. What had been the name of that cheeky red-haired imp from that German series that Ivan had been tormenting them with for a while? He decided to focus on the essentials. "We should go find your parents."

"What's your name?" the fox girl asked instead, blinking at him.

Yuriy stared down at her. "What's yours?"

" Zinaida !"

Almost in sync, Yuriy and the fox girl raised their heads as the call rang out across the market. But while the little girl's eyes widened and she waved enthusiastically, Yuriy felt his stomach area turn into a pit of ice. He knew he should go, and go as fast as he could, but his legs didn't move. Paralyzed, he stared at the woman making her way through the crowd and smiling in relief when her eyes fell on the fox girl. The face was not his, but it was as familiar as the feeling of a panic attack, just as her smile was the ghost of a long-buried memory. She smiled, and Yuriy couldn't take his eyes off her as she wrapped the girl in her arms and held her close.

Then she raised her eyes, looked at him and froze into a pillar of salt.

Her hair was the same, exactly the same shade of red as his own.

For some reason, he suddenly thought of the music box that had always been on her bedside table when he had been a child. It had been an old, carefully tended thing that played the melody of an old Russian folk song when you wound it up. Yuriy had spent hours watching the porcelain couple, a strapping soldier and a coyly laughing girl in a loose dress, dance. He had forgotten about it. He had forgotten about many things that had once been important.

He also didn't remember exactly when his father had grabbed the music box and hurled it across the apartment at his mother, exactly when it had flown into the stained wall and shattered into a thousand pieces. It felt like he should be able to remember.

"Yura," said the woman who had been his mother. She had put her hand in front of her mouth and was staring at him with wide, dark eyes. With her other arm she held the fox girl as if she would be lost forever if she didn't.

Yuriy looked at that arm.

Then he looked back at her face and said very calmly, "You should take better care of your child."

She recoiled. The  foxgirl resisted her grip and finally slipped from underneath her arm to look up at her indignantly, but the woman who had once been his mother paid no attention. Instead, her eyes were fixed on him almost fearfully. As if he possessed answers to  questions she had never asked him. His guts still felt like ice. But his legs obeyed him again and he turned to walk away with quick steps while he still could. She had enough experience with that herself, after all.

"Who is that? Do you know him?" he heard the fox girl ask still.

The answer, if there was one, was lost in the tangle of voices and other lives. Yuriy told himself that he was glad he didn't have to know everything and that he didn't owe anyone anything.

He went home.

He cooked borsch, two liters of it, without meat. And then he remembered that there were two children, a fox girl and a wolf boy, and only one of them had a maternal arm to protect them from being hurt by the world.

After that, things went downhill pretty quickly.

**2.**  


The fate of stars depended on their initial mass. Everything that had more than five solar masses exploded at the end of its existence in a supernova, in which the star shed the outer layers like clothes it no longer wanted to wear. It defoliated, layer by layer, flesh and bone and sinew and blood, and flung it all into space. The rest of the star collapsed into a black hole or a neutron star.

That was all that was left of its light when it was finished.

"Yura," Sergey said. He made a sound to indicate that he was listening, then reached for the already completely soaked towel, dried his hands, had a moment of wild hope that it was all right now, and felt the tingling creep up inside him again, a wild fear that could not subside. Strange blood was on his hands and sinking into his skin. Strange pain ate through his bones and into his guts.  _ My God _ , he thought with his demon brain and turned on the water again,  _ no one wants me like this. No one will ever want me like this. _

"Okay, I can't - I can't watch this anymore," Sergey ground out. Yuriy began to struggle as Sergey grabbed him and pulled him away from the sink. But Sergey was tall and broad, and Sergey wasn't afraid to hold him while Yuriy squirmed in his arms. He squeezed him tighter, one hand on the back of his head as if to keep him from hitting himself anywhere, then dragged him out of the bathroom. Yuriy was very sure he was giving Sergey a black eye, but he just cursed heartily and dragged him on until he had him in the kitchen, and when Yuriy was pushed onto one of the  kitchen chairs, his strength suddenly left him.

He looked up and Sergey gave him an indistinct look. Without thinking about it, he said, "I'm okay."

The indistinct expression turned to somber concern. "Yura, it's three in the morning. Do you know how long you were in there?"

Yuriy fell silent and rubbed his brow, sending little sparks of pain through his fingers. He did know. He was aware of what he was doing, after all, even if he couldn't do anything about it.

_ No wonder everyone leaves _ , his demon brain helpfully contributed.

_ Fuck you _ , Yuriy thought back, as he had successfully done a thousand times before. This time, nevertheless, he continued to eye the sink.

Sergey sighed deeply and picked up the first aid kit from the shelf to sit beside him with it. "Give me your hands."

_ Water _ , said the demon brain,  _ all you can do is clean all the layers so no one touches the black core. _

Yuriy gave Sergey his hands and winced at the skin contact.

Sergey clucked his tongue and muttered some deep Siberian curses he must have picked up from his colleagues. Yuriy was feeling his body right now about as much as he would have felt a tapestry at the other end of a room, so he looked rather impassively at the reddened, cracked skin that curled white like a sliced whale at the completely shriveled fingertips. "It hasn't been this bad in at least a year. What's wrong?"

Yuriy was silent, concentrating on not pulling his hands away or going to check the doors and windows. That was a compulsion that hadn't occurred since the first year after the abbey collapsed, except for the fact that he always locked up very carefully - which he thought was just common sense. Sergey was patient. He didn't press for an answer while he applied cream to Yuriy's hands and then began bandaging them on the fly. By now he had gotten really good at cross-bandaging.

"You know talking helps," Sergey reminded him.

Yuriy thought of the woman who had been his mother and the fox girl and made a choked sound.

"Okay, okay," Sergey muttered, quickly grabbing his wrists to hold him ironclad as he tried to get up. "That’s the current state of affairs. Okay. Yura - goddamn it, it's too fucking early - look at me, okay?"

Yuriy looked at him. Sergey gave him little choice in the matter because he had his hands around his face to pin him down. He hated to make his team - so much more than a team, always had been, but the word "family" was driving up his stomach acid at the moment - worry.

"Let’s make a list," Sergey said.

A list. Of course. It was so simple. Just the word broke a bit of the cycle that the damaged part of his mind was permanently trying to push him into right now. Lists were his friends when he felt like control was slipping away. Yuriy slumped a little and closed his eyes to take a deep breath. He felt Sergey let go of him and briefly pat his shoulder, before he got up and rummaged in one of the kitchen drawers. Yuriy rose and was annoyed as well as grateful when he felt Sergey's attentive gaze on him, which only turned  away when he saw Yuriy heading for the coffee maker.

While he made a pot - more for Sergey than for himself since caffeine was a very, very bad idea right now - he stared at his watered-down reflection in the window. Behind it: Moscow, exhausted from a long night, catching its breath for a new day. Yuriy took a breath as well, poured coffee into Sergey's favorite cup and set it down in front of him. The grateful look was comforting for his insides that still felt covered with frost, and he settled back in his chair.

Sergey had fished some paper and a chewed pencil out of the drawer. Both were now pushed towards him before Sergey clutched the cup with a contented sigh and inhaled the coffee.

Yuriy stared at the sheet. Then he looked up. "Did you know that about 75% of all stars exist in a binary or multiple star system? In areas of greatly increased stellar density, star clusters can occur."

"Star clusters," Sergey repeated sleepily, propping his head up on one large hand while continuing to hold the cup in the other. "That sounds nice."

"It is," Yuriy said quietly, reaching for the pen and writing,  _ Prepone next therapy appointment. _

"What does a star cluster like that look like?"  Sergey pondered, yawning with barely restraint.

"The Pleiades, for example, is one," Yuriy said absent-mindedly and wrote,  _ 2\. Extend jogging schedule _ . "They found super star clusters a while ago, in the sixties."

Sergey made an interested noise and took another sip. "What makes them so super?"

"They consist of many main sequence stars of spectral class O, which are the hottest and most massive stars," Yuriy replied and wrote,  _ 3\. Ask social worker for the number. _ The pen paused over that point. He took a deep breath, then said, "Quite a lot of supernovae occur, that's why they are surrounded with ionized H-II regions, making them the same ultra-dense H regions as Milky Ways."

"Okay," said Sergey peacefully, who had presumably tuned out at 'supernovae.' But then he surprised him by finishing his coffee and saying, "It's cool, right? That they do something cool like that by permanently exploding?"

"Oh," Yuriy said in surprise, thought for a moment, and then wrote  _ 4\. Do overtime to keep brain busy _ on the list. Then he put the pen aside.

Sergey , interpreting this as a sign of departure, glanced at his wristwatch. The coffee had apparently had little effect, for he still looked as if he might fall asleep at any moment.

"Yura," he said, "since Borya is not here, you’ll sleep with me." When Yuriy opened his mouth, he raised his index finger. "Non-negotiable. You need to sleep and I'm not leaving you now. Please take your pills and come."

_ You don't need help _ , the demon brain said,  _ if you start being treated like a child now, you've lost all value. _

Sergey seemed to read some of this on its face because he put a hand on Yuriy's arm and said very gently, "Do it for me. I can't sleep either, knowing you're haunting the neighborhood."

"Okay," Yuriy said, carefully folding the list once lengthwise and once crosswise in the middle so that all the edges were exactly on top of each other, and kept it in his hand even as morning dawned over Moscow and he finally found sleep.

**3.**  


"What’re you even telling people at work?" asked Ivan with a nod to Yuriy’s bandaged arms and hands. He hadn't commented on the fact that Yuriy had come into his room and sat down on the floor where he could lean his back against his bedpost. Ivan's cat, Rodya, after much deliberation, had decided to climb off the bookshelf and lie down next to him without them touching.

"Vanya," Yuriy said with raised brows, "I work part-time in the accounting department of a three-person business, and they all know I don't like to talk about myself. The questions keep to a minimum unless  they're coming from you."

"Don't have to ask, don't get any answers anyway," Ivan said. As Yuriy began to play with the hem of his sleeve, Ivan grabbed a jar of buttons and held it out to him. "Here. Count those."

Yuriy's eyebrows furrowed, recognizing occupational therapy when it was in front of him, but at the moment he was grateful for any help against his compulsion so he accepted the jar and emptied it on the floor. While Ivan turned back to cleaning an old brass clock, Yuriy began sorting the buttons by size first, much to Rodya's interest. At some point in the last few years, Ivan's room had begun to resemble a cabinet of curiosities. Shelves stretched along all the walls on which more and more stuff piled up that Ivan found in junk stores, somewhere along the way in town or in nature. He took them with him, polished and then kept them. Things had been arranged by category, just like in a museum, and carefully labeled with Ivan's spidery handwriting on labels. Sergey claimed that Ivan even kept a catalog of his possessions, but Yuriy was not entirely convinced by that. His eyes fell on a glittering meteorite that had been found in Russia and that he had once brought as a souvenir for Ivan. He had gone with Kai and Boris to the site of the impact when things between the three of them where in their blooming phase, and they had stared into that crater after days of driving through Russia. That had been a good summer, despite the fist fight that had occurred.

"Did you know that you can calculate the fall location of meteors using a geometric intersection method?" he asked, considering sorting by color within the different button sizes, but deciding against it due to the multicolored nature of some of the objects. He wanted to save himself the headache.

"You  wanna hit me with the formula for that," Ivan said without lifting his head. He had gone through a growth spurt in the last year and still hadn't gotten past 5'6", but that didn't seem to bother him much. Rather, he was busy growing a beard, which went more poorly than not and left him scratching his stubbly chin constantly. "I feel it. Let it out."

"You have no right to that knowledge, you philistine," Yuriy said dryly, at which Ivan let out a short laugh. Yuriy smiled, lowered his head back to the buttons, and stopped Rodya from stealing one.

When it remained quiet, Ivan turned to him, the cleaning cloth still in his hand. "Seryozha says you're not sleeping," he then said.

"Gossip monger," Yuriy muttered, finally starting to count.

"Is it because Boris is at the boxing tournament in Omsk? He'll be back in three days anyway, no need for a nervous breakdown."

"What am I, a desperate housewife?" Yuriy asked, aghast, and now he did look up, only to find that Ivan had once again deliberately riled him up.

Now he put the cleaning cloth aside and crossed his arms in front of his chest. "If it's not that, what is it then?"

Yuriy looked at the buttons, then back at Ivan. "It has come to my attention that you may be able to calculate where the meteorite may hit, but that doesn't protect you from the impact either."

Ivan eyed him sharply and scratched his chin. "Go on."

"We've been spared major meteorite impacts only by chance so far," Yuriy said, "and it's also only by chance that two-thirds of the impacts so far have been on uninhabited parts of the earth. But coincidence is actually also something that doesn't exist, because it can be calculated just like everything else. There are only probabilities, some of which are more likely to occur than others. You'd think that would make it certain."

"What?"

"Life," Yuriy said. When Ivan said nothing but continued to look at him, he finally added, "But probabilities are just probabilities. Most of the time there are no absolute certainties."

Ivan nodded thoughtfully, then shook his head. "Sorry, Yura, you'll have to give me the chiffre to the code this time."

Yuriy exhaled slowly. "When you found out you had an aunt and cousins," he said, "how could you look them in the eye?"

Ivan frowned and sat up a little more. "It's not like they knew where I was. What happened?"

He was unable to get around the demon brain that kept whispering to him, _Shut_ _up, keep still, or you'll get hurt. Or else it's going to get_ _worse,_ _it's going to get worse if you don't shut up._ So he shrugged and focused on the buttons again, trying his hardest not to go into the bathroom and turn on the faucet.

After a moment of silence, Ivan said, "It's still funny sometimes, visiting them and thinking about how my cousins have never been put in something like the Abbey. That they don't know anything like that. But I'm glad that we communicate with each other."

"Vanya," Yuriy said after a long silence.

Ivan tilted his head and raised his brows. "Yes?"

"If you had a choice between a fox and a wolf," Yuriy said, "who would you choose?"

"The wolf," Ivan said without hesitation.

"Why?"

Ivan looked him firmly in the eye and said, "Because the wolf always leads me home."


	2. Strike

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a pure therapy session in which Yuriy doesn‘t make it easy neither for his therapist nor for himself. This is just a little **warning** , because things like **domestic violence** are discussed and said discussion gets quite rough in places.

"Oh, _you_ find it exhausting?" snapped Yuriy, running a hand through his hair. "Then you’ve got a fraction of an idea how I feel after having to deal with this _all the time_."

His therapist, Marina Fyodorovna, didn't even bat an eye. She was a tall, massive woman with short, iron-gray hair and dark eyes who had been one of the first women trained as a therapist in the Soviet Union, even though Yuriy had always felt that she had long ago abandoned the methods she had been taught. Yuriy had worn out four therapists before her, but Marina Fyodorovna was not afraid of him, nor was she overwhelmed or gave in under him. She was a bulwark, and just now he hated her abysmally for it.

Even that left her relatively unimpressed, though she had to see it clearly in his eyes. "We've been at this point before, Yuriy Nikolaevich."

"Making patronyms legally mandatory is a symptom of this society's sickness," Yuriy said, dropping back into the chair in front of Marina Fyodorovna's massive desk.

His therapist took what he offered. "And why is that?"

"What does it say about me or where I belong to carry the name of a man who beat me and my mother and got drunk every day because he couldn't stand not being important anymore? Why would I want to put myself in that lineage?" Yuriy hissed. The hairs on his arms had stood up. He could feel it, could feel himself balancing on the edge of an abyss, and the fear made him even more crazed than usual.

"Why don't you put it down and choose a new one?" Marina Fyodorovna asked just as sharply.

"Because I can't!"

His therapist raised an eyebrow. "There are available forms. Sure, the expense is no small one, but you are a person of public interest-"

"A year ago, maybe."

"Our country grants greater freedoms to top athletes than to others, and you know it. And the bureaucracy - well, at least it's not Soviet bureaucracy anymore."

"I can't," Yuriy repeated, digging his fingers into his red hair before he could grab something and fling it around. "I can't, I can't change anything."

"That's not true, but it's not that either," Marina Fyodorovna said. "Why do you go by that name and not your grandfather's?"

"Aren't you listening to me? Because I can't, you goddamn-"

"Watch your tongue, Yuriy Nikolaevich," Marina Fyodorovna said harshly, "and leave your hair alone - here."

Yuriy took the stress ball she handed him and hurled it across the office until it banged against the office door and rolled off the floor.

There was silence for a moment, then Marina Fedorovna stared at him meaningfully. "Are you feeling better now?"

"No!"

Marina Fyodorovna folded her arms in front of her chest. "I can give you another one. Maybe you'll hit the potted plant this time; I'd like justification for a new one anyway."

"I'm not here to dismantle your facility," Yuriy hissed.

"No," Marina Fyodorovna said harshly, "you're here to dismantle yourself and use me as a catalyst to do it. But right now you're behaving like a gazelle afraid to go to the water hole for fear of the lion."

"I'm not a gazelle," Yuriy said more to himself than to her, "and I'm not afraid."

"Prove it to me," Marina Fyodorovna said, tilting her head a fraction. "Why don't you change your patronymic, Yuriy Nikolaevich?"

Yuriy buried his face in his hands. "It's just a name. It's not even worth all the bureaucratic hassle."

"A name is never just a name," Marina Fyodorovna said, sounding almost kind. "Why don't you dye your hair?"

Yuriy lowered his hands and stared at her. "Excuse me?"

"Well, with your patronymic, perhaps bureaucracy is getting in the way." She tilted her head again and regarded him with glittering eyes. "But how come you never dyed your hair?"

Yuriy stared at her for a long, long time. His mouth was so dry that for a moment he thought only dust would come out if he opened it. Then, however, his body tensed to the extreme and he hissed, "Are you kidding me?"

"Absolutely not."

"I know what you're getting at," Yuriy said, holding himself back from slamming his fist on the table only at the last moment. "You must think you're so clever! I don't dye my hair because I'm attached to my past. To that shitty lineage of two people who only cared about themselves. Because I don't like to let go, even the crappy parts of who I am. That's what you're getting at, isn't it?"

"I said nothing of the sort, but it's interesting you see it that way." The corners of Marina Fyodorovna's mouth twitched.

Yuriy realized that he had fallen straight into her trap and glared at her. "You really are the worst."

His therapist returned the gaze warily, but without fear or hurt. "I can't help it if you're sometimes cleverer than is good for you. Wouldn't you like to throw something after all?"

"No," Yuriy growled, upset, "stop goading me!"

"I think that's what I'm being paid for."

"Not for this!"

"If you don't want to throw anything and you don't want to change your name," Marina Fyodorovna said neutrally, "what do you want?"

"I want to be good," Yuriy muttered, without thinking about it and without lowering his hands. His heart contracted, tightened until he felt like he couldn't breathe. "I want to be happy. I want to stop freaking out over something that doesn't matter anymore."

There was silence for a moment. Then he heard Marina Fyodorovna rise before coming to him and putting a hand on his shoulder, ignoring his flinch at the contact.

"Being good is hard work and attitude, not something inherent," she said quietly, "and luck comes and goes. But we’re working on it. You've been working very hard on it for a very long time, and you've made good progress."

Now Yuriy did look up and wordlessly held out his bandaged hands to her, raising an eyebrow.

Marina Fyodorovna clicked her tongue, unimpressed, and wandered over to the samovar behind her desk chair. She filled a cup with black tea and handed it to him across the table, then dropped back into her desk chair. "This is a short-term setback that happens to everyone. Focus on the fact that you've taken necessary steps to get to a better mindset again."

Yuriy snorted.

"You're taking back control, Yuriy Nikolaevich. That's why you're here, isn't it?"

"Knowledge is control, and control is power," Yuriy muttered.

Marina Fyodorovna made a sound that could have been both agreement and disagreement. She waited until he had taken a sip and then said, "What makes you think your mother's departure no longer matters?"

"It shouldn't matter anymore," Yuriy said.

"That‘s two entirely different things."

Yuriy took a deep breath. "There's nothing you can do about it now. It's ridiculous. She made her decisions, my father made his decision, and I made mine."

Marina Fyodorovna looked at him for a while and stroked her chin thoughtfully. Then she said, "You knew that your mother tried to contact you after the abbey collapsed."

Yuriy said nothing, but wrapped his hands a little tighter around the cup.

Marina Fyodorovna watched him without blinking even once, then continued, "You knew that, and we've discussed long enough why you didn't want to see her back then. Once again, that was your absolute right and just like I did back then, I still agree with you that there were more important things to work on at that time. But six months ago we were still discussing whether you should contact her. At least you had expressed the desire to do so. Didn't you?"

Yuriy closed his eyes and pushed his face deeper into his turtleneck sweater.

"You would have had the opportunity to talk to her now," Marina Fyodorovna continued mercilessly. "Why didn't you?"

"I was shopping," Yuriy said nonsensically.

Marina Fyodorovna snorted. "Lie to me for all I care, but not to yourself."

"I should have shaken her hand in the middle of the market and talked to her?" Yuriy asked sarcastically, imitating an overly friendly voice, "Oh, hello, Mother, so the grief wasn't great enough not to find someone new and let him f-"

"Go ahead and say it," Marina Fyodorovna said calmly. "This is a room where you can say anything, no matter how ugly it is. I am not judging you. I'm just your catalyst to help you detox."

"It was the girl," Yuriy said. He could hear his own blood rushing in his ears as he slowly began to slip. It was like an avalanche he couldn't stop, but almost as if he could, he started talking faster. "She has the same color hair as me, exactly the same, but she looks like a fox. How old is she, maybe seven? Eight? Maybe she’s just small."

"What do you feel when you think about her?" asked Marina Fyodorovna, growing calmer the more agitated he got.

"I hate her," Yuriy whispered, because it didn't matter anyway. Marina Fyodorovna knew the black hole inside him that threatened to eat up everything if he didn't keep it constantly in check. She knew his cruelty and his indifference, his sharp edges that no one would ever be able to file down, and she knew the ice, the eternal ice. "I want her to not exist - she's weak. A weakling. You should have seen her, a branch in the wind. I could have broken her neck in the middle of the market. I could have taken her and sold her and they would never have found her again. She would never have survived on the street or in the abbey. Volkov would have wiped the floor with her."

"And you hate her for that?"

"No," Yuriy said, setting the cup down before he could hurl it across the room with his trembling fingers. Anger burned inside him, burned him out, and he wanted most to cry because of it.

_Hush_ , muttered the demon brain, _hush. Those that cry are found more quickly._

Yuriy took a deep breath. "I hate her because she doesn't have to be strong."

"Because your mother takes care of her," Marina Fyodorovna said quietly. "Because she didn't leave her." When Yuriy nodded, she interlaced her fingers and propped her head on them, gazing out the window for a moment. Silence, broken only by the ticking of her grandfather clock. Outside the window was Moscow, not caring what ghosts haunted old buildings and young minds.

Yuriy closed his eyes. Then he whispered, "I just want to know what I did wrong."

"You did nothing wrong," Marina Fyodorovna replied gently.

"That can't be true," Yuriy countered. "I must have done something wrong, otherwise she wouldn't punish me like that. Otherwise she wouldn't have exchanged me. Otherwise she wouldn't have left me alone. We should have been a team - that was the pact, we should have been a team, and instead she went and exchanged me. If I hadn't done anything wrong-"

Marina Fyodorovna waited without taking her eyes off him.

Yuriy took a deep breath. It hurt. The words burned in his lungs and on his tongue. He didn't want to say what had been carried by him for years. Old pain, so old that he had hidden it deep, deep in his bones. Dragging it out into daylight was exhausting and felt like throwing himself completely defenseless at the feet of someone who wanted to crush him. Instinctively, he wanted to curl around that old pain, around those words, and push them back into the darkness to protect them, and himself right along with them.

Marina Fyodorovna was waiting, and there was no one here who could hurt him but himself.

Yuriy closed his eyes. Then he said very quietly and with sudden, all-encompassing exhaustion, "If I had done nothing wrong, I would have been enough."

He breathed through the silence, burying his face in his sleeve and his hands in his hair. The grandfather clock ticked away tirelessly. Outside the window was Moscow, which had never given a damn whether he lived or died, and whether he had to go through all of it alone or not.

"Yuriy," Marina Fyodorovna said gently after a while, "it wasn't your fault. You were a child. Only adults can take responsibility. Your mother was a victim, too, but that doesn't mean she didn't shirk a responsibility she had, and it's perfectly normal and understandable that you’re hurt by that. Do you understand me? You're allowed to let it hurt."

"Why didn't she take me with her?" Yuriy asked, unable to listen to himself as he fell fully into the abyss and his voice broke. "I understand why she left - but why didn't she take me with her? Why is there room for her and there was no one for me? How cowardly is that - how weak? How can you just go and leave someone behind when they need you?"

Marina Fyodorovna said nothing. But she put the box of tissues in front of him, got up and sat next to him.

She did not touch him. But when he finally looked up again, they shared a cigarette in her no-smoking office, and through the wide-open window they watched Moscow that lived on tirelessly toward the future despite all the ghosts that did not want to rest.


End file.
